A short history of the Irish grá for ice cream
'In Ireland, they have to feed the hens on ice-cream to keep them from laying hard boiled eggs.'
By Regina Sexton UCC
Analysis: Once only consumed on special occasions, ice cream has gone from being a luxury and to becoming a regular summer treat for the masses
Cloonaghgarve is a rural townland in Co Galway that is a few miles east of the small village of Milltown and around eight miles north of the town of Tuam. In the 1930s, one of its inhabitants contributed a humorous story about ice cream to the National Folklore Schools’ Collection. A contributor from Blacklion, Co Cavan also tells a similar story and both serve the same purpose: to undermine an exaggerated claim by countering with a comparison of fantastical proportions. If this story was circulating amongst Irish storytellers, the scene that is set is so risible and the intentions so preposterous that it cannot fail to be funny.
There was once an american [sic.] man and an Irishman “Pat”. The American was boasting about the heat in America. He said that it was so hot that it was burning the wings of [sic] the flies. “Thats nothing” said Pat compare [sic.] to the heat that is in Ireland. They have to feed the hens on ice-cream to keep them from laying hard boiled eggs.
We can assume that the Cloonaghgarve storyteller is one of the Flahertys recorded in the 1901 and 1911 censuses. In 1911, Peter Flaherty is listed as a farmer’s son living in a typical vernacular house that had several farm buildings including a stable, a cart house, a barn, a piggery, and a fowl house. By the 1930s, when material was being collected by school children for the folklore commission, Peter was 55 years old, possibly still farming and living a food culture that balanced self-sufficiency with shop-bought commercial goods like tea, sugar, dried fruits, and indeed an increasing number of factory-made foods.
Milltown was the nearest village to provide basic commercial goods with fancier products available on trips to Tuam or Galway city. Several of Peter’s stories, told in English, were collected in the 1930s and he is recorded as a speaker of English and Irish on censuses returns.
In rural Ireland of the 1930s, ice cream was a rarity consumed, if available, as an indulgence on fair, market and pattern days. Occasionally, travelling dealers sold special day treats like sweets, bananas and ice cream with hawkers no doubt taking advantage of advances in refrigeration to bring chilled foods to gatherings in rural Ireland.
By this time, shops, grocers, hotels and cafés in the larger towns and cities offered a variety of flavoured ice creams to customers as an attractive speciality of their businesses. John Moran’s on the Dublin Road in Tuam, for instance, was advertised as a ‘high class grocer and confectionary’ in the Tuam Herald in the 1930s selling Dublin’s Lucan Dairy ice cream (made from fresh cream) in several new flavours from their ‘Up-to-date Ice Cream Frigidaire Cabinet’.
Several grocers sold their own home-made ice creams alongside the larger commercial brands like Lucan Dairy and HB Ice Cream with the latter on the market since 1926. In Galway city, advertisements for the GBC café on Williamsgate Street in the Connaught Tribune through the 1940 talked about its range of ‘excellent cooking, luncheons, grills, cold joints and salads, their famous walnut cakes, bracks, and tea-time fancies’ together with ‘HB Ice Cream De Luxe, iced drinks and cocktails from their ‘up-to-date ice cream parlour.’
The growing market in chilled and iced foods reflected advances made in food science and technology throughout the 19th century. The development of more sophisticated ice cream-making machinery, together with improvements in refrigeration, was a boon to the ice cream trade with the first commercial ice cream factory opening in America after 1851.
By the late 19th century, ice cream was no longer a food exclusive to the wealthy and it was now becoming the food of the masses as evident in the consumption of cheap ‘penny licks’ sold by street vendors in larger UK and US cities. These pennyworths of ice cream were sold in thick glass containers from which the customer licked clean the contents and returned the glass for reuse.
Health and hygiene concerns about the safety of ice cream sold by street vendors and hawkers – and the circulation of stories detailing deaths from contaminated ice, eggs and cream – saw commercial ice-cream producers advertise their confections as made from the purest of ingredients. This was either fresh cream or ice cream powders, mixed and frozen in the most up-to-date equipment.
By the early 20th century, older methods of ice cream-making based on setting and freezing mixtures with ice and salt were increasingly replaced in commercial settings with a growing reliance on more modern, reliable, quicker, and safer methods of production. In America, the Prohibition Era saw a significant upsurge in the consumption of ice cream and the popularity of ice cream parlours.
In Ireland, these developments are seen in the increased availability and distribution of ice cream machinery and powdered ice cream mixes. Advertisements for equipment are regularly featured in the newspapers of the time suggesting a constructed level of excitement around the possibilities of ice cream production on a small scale by shops, grocers and confectioners with ‘freezing apparatus for ice creams; ice cream wafers; ice cream cups; ice cream powders, ice cream bricks, and every description of ice cream machine and appliance’ available for purchase.
By the 1920s, cold mix ice cream powders, both imported and Irish made, promised more speedy production and better ice cream quality above the hot mix powders that might bring a degree of taste-spoil given the possibility of milk-burn in production. According to the Belfast News Letter of May 1927, these cold mixes represented ‘a great advance on the methods of making ice cream now generally in vogue.’
But what of Cloonaghgarve and the ice cream-eating hens? It is impossible to know if Peter Flaherty was aware of the developments in ice cream-making that occurred during his lifetime. What is more likely is that he was familiar with the sweet, chilled confection, where familiar could be simply an awareness of the product or possibly a familiarity that came with tasting and consuming it on occasion.
However, domestic ice cream making was not a feature of typical rural food patterns. Knowledge of the product brought about by its increased availability in urban and commercial contexts made it a relatable and effective comedic element in stories of hens and their eating habits in sweltering Irish weather conditions. In this example, the incongruity of the scene that mixed the familiar and the unfamiliar with the ludicrous made this a story that was probably well received. Nonetheless, it was a story rooted in the bigger developments in food technologies, retailing and changing food and consumption habits.
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